Join the KU Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) on Wednesday March 6 at 3:00pm in the Pine Room of the Kansas Union for "Spatial Modes and Contingencies of Russian (Re)colonization," a round table with Dr. Vera Smirnova, Dr. Shannon O'Lear, and Dr. Elena Trubina.

Various spatial practices have seen a comeback in Russia’s revanchist geopolitical attempts. These are often resemblant of historical forms of Russian colonialism, settler colonial practices, and ways of imperial knowledge production in and about Eurasia.
Different geographical features made the Russian forms of colonialism distinct. Scholars have recognized contradictory spatial technologies taking place in this process –intentionally creating “empty spaces” by depleting, overusing, terraforming, and exhausting their long-term potential, at the same time employing extreme macro-technologies of power to insert full control over other, not less important locations.

These now feature in Russia’s current (re)colonizing efforts – in the war in Ukraine. While rippling effects of these geopolitical strategies have been analyzed, exploration of their spatial effects has been lacking. The proposed panel will attempt to read spatial languages and trace intellectual origins and legacies of knowledge production in and about empire in the current geopolitical moment.

Panelists:
Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University
Elena Trubina, UNC Chapel Hill
Shannon O’Lear, University of Kansas

Dr. Vera Smirnova joined Kansas State University after earning her PhD from the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech and completing postdoctoral fellowship at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. Her work draws on political geography to explore relations between land and power, in particular analyzing private property regimes and modes of territorial sovereignty in pre- and post-Soviet Russia. Vera’s research has been published in leading geography outlets including the Annals of the AAG, the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Geoforum. Vera is also a co-chair of the Eurasian Geography Specialty Group at the American Association of Geographers.

Dr. Elena Trubina, since her arrival at UNC-Chapel Hill in January 2022, has contributed substantially to the Russian and East European studies curriculum at UNC at Chapel Hill in her role as a visiting lecturer and postdoctoral research scholar. She taught an advanced seminar (GLBL 490) in the UNC Curriculum in Global Studies for two years and co-organized a speaker series on “Civic Organizations, Higher Education, Democratic Commitments in a Globalized, Precarious, and Post-Truth World at War: Spotlighting Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and the US”. She works on the project “Small Town America” stemming from her teaching at Erfurt Applied Sciences university and her individual research study, “Human Rights and the Destruction and Reconstruction of Cities in an Age of Crisis”.

Shannon O'Lear is a political geographer with interests in environmental geopolitics, critical geopolitics, the South Caucasus, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). She is interested in decoding political stories about the environment and how those stories, and agendas underlying them, have spatial impacts and implications. She demonstrates this approach in my 2018 book, Environmental Geopolitics (Rowman and Littlefield) and her 2019 edited volume, A Research Agenda for Environmental Geopolitics (Edward Elgar). She has also edited a volume, A Research Agenda for Geographies of Slow Violence (Edward Elgar 2021) in which a wide range of scholars demonstrate different ways to study violence that is obscured and difficult to see. She has published work on climate science, geography and STS, geopolitics in Azerbaijan and Armenia, genocide and other forms of violence. She served as an Expert on the Environmental Science and Human Security Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (AC-ERE) of the National Science Foundation to produce a report, Environmental Change and Human Security: Research Directions. She has served as the Councilor for the Great Plains Rocky Mountain Region of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) through 2023, and she is now a Fellow in the AAG’s “Elevate the Discipline” inaugural cohort. She holds a BA in Geography and Russian and a Master’s degree in Geography from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a Ph.D. in Geography from Syracuse University. Currently, she is the Director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Kansas.